We found a location for our biggest rest product, the spent grains. It is well known that this can be used for cattle and we found a farmer nearby where the cows seem to be very eager for it! The farmer assured us that the lady’s are exaggerating and that they do get enough to eat!

Following the success of our first beer, we are proud to present you: Hermelijn (Ermine in English), a hoppy weizen!
In this beer we combine the flavors and aroma’s of a traditional German weizen beer with the fruitiness of American citrus hops. The taste is fresh and the beer has an attractive hop bitterness.

Our hop is growing pretty good! even though we just planted them this spring. Recent weeks several plants have reached the top, for them its not so lonely up there ;-).
It seems like we will harvest quite some hops this year!

This year we will also be able to determine what type of hop does well on our soil: grow well, produce good amounts and quality of cones, and are the least affected by bugs or diseases. Next year we may use that information to optimize our hop production.

Our Otto may be limping, and according to some too thick, yet he is running faster than we hoped! At various places he is now sold out! So, today we filled new bottles and in about 1 to 2 weeks they can be delivered to the stores.

These days we’re still mainly busy creating a sanitary environment, fit for producing superb beers. We were able to cover most of the plumbing and and electricity with a drywall ceiling. We painted the ceiling and walls with a paint that can resist the humid environment from the brew process and can be cleaned easily.

We also built a warm room. When we fill our bottles with beer we’ll also add a little bit of sugar, the yeast will ferment this small amount of sugar into alcohol and CO2. Since the bottles will be closed with a cap the yeast will be carbonating the beer in a natural way to a desired pressure and use up any left-over oxygen. The re-fermentation takes place at a warm temperature and therefore we will have to heat the warm room somewhat. The excess heat from the refrigerators that we use for the main fermentation will be used for this.

The finishing touch for our beer will be performed with recycled heat!

Warm room and walls finished. The fridges will be placed on the outside of the room.

One of the following tasks is to finish our work on the brewery (one wall gets one more layer of paint, floor needs some work too) and start constructing the fermentation capacity.

We had some progress the last few weeks. Remember the early spring? We took the opportunity to build our Hop garden! Already 8 plants have been put in the soil, 4 different varieties. Last week 4 more varieties have arrived and we will be putting them in the soil when the weather gets a less cold!

And yes, we also had some more paper works. Yesterday we registered our brewery at the chamber of commerce. This opens the way to registration at more organisations.

A new brewery will be founded in Wageningen: Brouwerij Wageningen. Yesterday we finally found a location and coming weeks we will be busy filling in the dutch paperworks and we will start to build up our brewery.

Please check back soon. We will be posting updates and pictures regularly!